Definitely getting swampy around here

In case you hadn’t heard, the upcoming (January 2024) Key West Literary Seminar will focus on Florida. And we have one hell of a lineup so it’s worth booking now. Hard to believe we were all trying to stay warm at the last one, with the “feels like” temperatures reaching the triple digits around here even before we officially reached summer.

On a recent roadtrip, my husband Mark and I did some prep by listening to Dave Barry’s new novel, Swamp Story. If you read and liked Big Trouble - or even just watched the excellent movie adaptation of it - this is one well worth a read. Or a listen - Dave reads it himself and does a fantastic job. It’s Florida absurdity in the best Elmore Leonard-Carl Hiaasen spirit and because it’s Dave Barry it’s funny as hell. He’s so funny he won a freaking Pulitzer, and I’ve always loved his work best when he’s taking a swipe at something serious. My all-time favorite of his columns was when he covered the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and he was good enough to keep that one on his website because God knows it would take Indiana Jones to unearth it from the Herald archives. In the new book, there is some nice, subtle shade thrown at the New York Times and its climate change reporting which doesn’t sound all that funny but it is. It really, really is.

This is an especially good book to listen to if you’re doing a Florida roadtrip, which we were - we even drove back on Tamiami Trail, where much of the action takes place, so that was a fun meta-moment. It’s so good that I enjoyed it even though I was experiencing a migraine. Really! It helped that Mark was driving and I could just shut my eyes to avoid the light and motion and whatever else was setting off the evil pulsing in my brain. But this story was definitely a helpful distraction. Thank you, Dave, and see you in January.

Here be dragons

I read a couple of Anne McCaffrey books as a kid, but I was never all that into dragons. I like them when they show up in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire — and especially in the HBO Game of Thrones adaptation — but that series is really about the people. Dragons are just a superweapon.

But in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, dragons are characters and that's the genius of the series. She just wrapped it up with League of Dragons, and she did it well. Fortunately there are nine books in all so if you're feeling bereft about the end of the series you can just start from the beginning again, with His Majesty's Dragon.

I can't really suggest these books for people who are jonesing for Game of Thrones between TV seasons or the much longer wait between books. The better comparison is with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series — because both are set in the British service during the Napoleonic wars and have a friendship at heart that is the most important in both parties' lives. But Naomi Novik is obviously writing an alternative/fantastical version of history (there are dragons!). So you get fun twists you'll never find in straight-up historical fiction. Like: Some dragons only allow women to be their captains/companions. Napoleon ranges even farther afield — all the way to South America. And most importantly, our protagonists and the society as a whole are forced to wrestle with their treatment of the dragons, many of whom are more intelligent than most people. Temeraire is an exceptional dragon, to be sure, but he is expert at mathematics and speaks multiple languages. And all the dragons are sentient beings, even if they are too often treated like livestock — or convenient weapons.

Really, these books are best suited for anyone who has ever felt strongly connected to an animal, like a dog or a horse. The fantasy isn't so much that there are giant, flying reptiles but that your companion from another species could communicate with you directly — and both delight and exasperate you with his or her idiosyncrasies. Dragons, in Novik's world, are imprinted on the first human who harnesses them and will do everything in their considerable powers to protect that person. Many are intelligent, though they have a weakness for treasure, especially the shiny kind.

That consideration of how dragons should be treated within society as a whole is really the heart of this series, and what elevates it above just another fantasy ... with dragons. Though it may have inspired me to give Anne McCaffrey's books another look (it's been more than 30 years). And also to finish the Aubrey-Maturin series, which I have been drawing out for well over a decade now.

Read these, not that

Not this

If you must do this, do it on audio. Or better yet, wait for your local library to get the audiobook.

Let’s get the negative out of the way: Julian Fellowes’s Belgravia. This is a serialized novel from the creator of Downton Abbey – I heard an NPR interview with him about it, I like historical fiction, I figured I’d give it a go. I also like to check out innovative or slightly different modes of storytelling – though the serial format is a bit of a throwback, too, it’s one that’s rarely seen anymore.

First, the app. It sucked. You had to sign in every time, it never remembered where you were, simply turning pages was far glitchier on the same device than it was in the Kindle or iBooks apps. You had to reload everything every time. New chapters didn’t appear until the day after they were promised. Overall, not pleasant.

Second, the content. I listened to the first (free) chapter on audio. Hiring the actress Juliet Stevenson to narrate the audiobook was the best decision anyone made regarding this enterprise. I liked it enough, and was feeling supportive enough about the whole idea, that I invested $14 to get the rest of the book, delivered in weekly installments.

I started reading the next few chapters and …  see page-turning glitchiness complaints, above. Also, it soon became clear that while Fellowes may be a supremely talented creator of high-end soap operas, he’s not a great writer, even in the context of historical romance. I read enough of those to know. This wasn’t, strictly, a romance — I’d call it more of a melodrama. But it was insanely predictable and two-dimensional even by those standards.

Which made me very surprised to read in Entertainment Weekly an interview about his latest project, Julian Fellowes Presents Doctor Thorne (for future reference: avoid projects where the creator’s name appears in the title). Fellowes said this: “Trollope is one of my favorite writers of all time. His emotional position is very similar to my own in that nobody is all good or all bad.”

And my immediate reaction was, what the hell are you talking about? Your villains are so bad they practically twirl their mustaches and the good guys are so good you almost want to smack them. I was glad when I saw that the good critics at Slate had also noted this odd contradiction, as Laura Miller wrote Fellowes “professes to love Trollope and to value the “moral complexity” of his characters, then proceeds to strip all such complexity out of their portrayal.” (She credits the TV critic Willa Paskin though Paskin’s review is kinder toward the TV show than Miller’s — enough that I might give it a try since we have Amazon Prime anyway and I’m curious to see Fellowes-as-Hitchcock. Or maybe I should just, you know, read Trollope.)

I went back to listening to the chapters on audio and found the experience improved considerably – thanks, Juliet Stevenson! Maybe Fellowes just writes better for dramatic presentation than old-fashioned reading anyway. Plus no more glitchy page turning. There’s nothing that makes you feel stupider than repeatedly swiping and tapping your iPad so you can read the next page of a book you don’t like that much that you paid real money for. Was it a waste of time? Kind of, though once I’d plunked down that $14 I was going to see this melodrama through to the melodramatic finale. I think that’s what I’m most annoyed about – if I’d gotten this book from the library or even paid a dollar or two on the Kindle, I would be OK with it. But $14 is real money, bookwise, and I feel like I fell for a British-accented, elaborately costumed scam.

And I didn’t even watch Downton Abbey.

These!

Worth the wait, and the length.

Enough with the negative. Let’s move on to gushing about highly hyped entertainment reading that delivered on its hype: The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. This is the third in the dystopian trilogy that started with  back in 2010. I was working at the library then and jumped on the train. Loved the first book, liked the second enough to get through it all (these books are loooooong) and I was damned sure going to finish the last.

It had been awhile (four years!) since The Twelve, though, so I was a little worried about what I remembered about the plot. And it’s not like you’re going to plow through a thousand-plus pages AGAIN to refresh yourself. So I used the same method I do on the rare occasions that George R.R. Martin produces a book – I read the plot summaries of previous installments on Wikipedia. Plus, Cronin used a future-history-of-the-chronicled-events plot device that reminded me of the events of book 2. And we were off.

I loved it. I spent the entire weekend wallowing around in that book – not rushing through, though it was a page-turner, not savoring though I was perfectly happy hanging out in that world. It wasn’t one of those giant tomes where you’re like, “This thing could easily lose a couple hundred pages and no one would notice.” The extended backstory was interesting and a fun return to the 1990s — and a refreshing break from the dystopic present of the novels. I liked it at least as much as the first novel and much better than the second. So I was very grateful to my local library for buying several copies and wish I could take that $14 back from Julian Fellowes and give it to Justin Cronin.

All the Austen essentials, delightfully updated.

My local library was also kind enough to supply a copy of Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld. This update of Pride and Prejudice (should that be Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?) got a rave in the New York Times Book Review so I figured I’d like it. And I liked the earlier installment I’d read in this series of contemporary Austen updates. It was also the perfect antidote – or remedy is maybe a better word — to my City of Mirrors book hangover. It’s not like I wanted to live in Justin Cronin’s created world — but I had been so intensely immersed in it that it was hard to focus on minor things like my life and my job. Eligible is a frothy social comedy in the best sense – and it was just so much fun to both learn about these new versions of Bennets and Bingleys and Darcys – as well as watch them reach the happy endings I knew were in store. My only complaint about Joanna Trollope’s version of Sense & Sensibility were that I felt she did some contortions to fit the plot into the 21st century. Sittenfeld’s use of a Bachelor-like reality show (the titular “Eligible”) was brilliant.

I loved how she adapted and changed the characters’ roles and ages but managed to hold onto the essentials – Liz is smart but sometimes a little too sharp, Darcy is uptight but honorable, Jasper Wick (ie Wickham) is a charming douchebag, Mrs. Bennett is pretty awful but hey, she’s your mom and Mr. Bennett is smart and funny but disastrously disengaged. Though my favorite change might be the most radical — Kathy DeBourgh as a formidable Gloria Steinem-like feminist icon.

I did gallop through this one – really, really short chapters made me feel like I was supposed to be doing that – but I was happy to do so. And immediately went to the library and got the two Austen updates I hadn’t read yet, Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid and Emma by Alexander McCall Smith. I really can’t wait to see who gets Persuasion.

Just because.

In review

So … five stars to Justin Cronin, Curtis Sittenfeld, their editors and publishers and of course my local library.

Two stars to Julian Fellowes – mostly for trying something a little bit out of the norm. Stick to screenwriting, dude, and next time hire a much better app developer. Though I will check out Downton Abbey one of these years.

Aren't they fantastic?

I recently reviewed two books that are right in my realistic fantasy wheelhouse for The Miami Herald — both are the final installments in trilogies and both were just great, in different ways. I’m going to link to the reviews here but they will eventually go off the Herald’s free site so I’ll try to remember to change this once that happens. In both cases, I strongly recommend reading the entire trilogy and not starting with the third volume.

First up was The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness, the finale in her All Souls Trilogy. The first book was called A Discovery of Witches; the second is The Book of Night. Harkness writes for those of us who are open to stories of the supernatural but don’t really want to deal with Twilight and its ilk. As I said in my review, despite most of their characters being witches, vampires and daemons, these books share more DNA with A.S. Byatt’s Possession than they do with Twilight. They start out in Oxford’s Bodleian library and its main characters, witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew Clairmont, are brought together by a long-lost manuscript that Diana accidentally conjures up during her research into medieval science (ie. alchemy). That manuscript is, of course, the titular Book of Life but to re-find it Diana and Matthew have to, essentially, change the world. And travel back in time to Elizabethan England (that’s the setting for the second book, The Book of Life). So if you like Tudor stuff, as I do, that’s another gold coin for you.

The second was The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman. This also includes the supernatural but it is a more conscious riff on other books, especially The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Mostly they are the story of Quentin Coldwater; at the beginning of the first book, The Magicians, he is a hyper-intelligent super-dorky kid who likes to practice sleight of hand (coin and card tricks) and can’t quite let go of his devotion to the series of books about Fillory, the rough equivalent of Narnia. What is supposed to be a college interview turns into his introduction to Brakebills, an academy of magic that is kind of like Hogwarts with sex and drugs. The second volume, The Magician King, recounts Quentin’s post-Brakebills adventures. The third has him back in the real world, ie. the Earth that we know, and confronting adulthood as he nears 30. I don’t want to go into too much detail for fear of spoilers but if you loved Narnia as a kid, these books are a must-read. And the final volume, especially, is in many ways a love letter to books and reading — I think it captures the way we all want to — and in fact, do — practice a little alchemy when we’re really immersed in a book no matter how unrealistic or different from our own lives it may be. Not surprising, since Grossman is the book critic for Time magazine, I suppose. I can’t wait to see what both these authors do next.

Old print dog starts learning new radio tricks

I feel like I've crossed some kind of Rubicon by spending more time over the last three weeks listening than reading. It makes perfect sense since those three weeks have been spent in an immersive radio school -- which for an old print person with extremely limited radio experience like myself feels a bit like entering Radio Grad School without having taken Radio 101.

Fortunately, the instructors and fellow students are as nice, smart, helpful and encouraging as could be.

Sometime in the last week between a presentation by a talented podcaster named Jonathan Groubert (whose podcast is called The State We're In) and grilling a talented classmate half my age who doesn't own an actual radio, I think I finally Got It about podcasts and how radio reaches people now. I am familiar with podcasts -- I used to laboriously download the BBC Newspod and NPR Books podcast to my computer via iTunes, then transfer them to an iPod, then listen while folding laundry or whatever. But that's a pain in the ass and I got out of the habit. I have occasionally downloaded episodes of This American Life or On the Media to my phone and listened there. But mostly, in a pretty old-fashioned, analog kind of way, I get my radio from the radio.

It turns out nobody, or at least nobody under the age of 30, does this anymore.* And that podcasting, now around for 10 years, is hitting its stride in a really interesting way. I had been thinking of podcasts as a way to catch up to radio shows that you missed, or that are not carried on your local station. They are that, but there are also smart, creative people out there making podcasts that aren't carried on many stations, or any stations at all. And you can get them .. for free! On your phone!

If you have a smartphone, you probably have a built-in podcast app. There are also lots of apps out there that make it even easier (Talented Classmate Half My Age recommended one called Downcast, which seems to be well worth the $2.99).**

So what I have been listening to? Of course This American Life, because how can you not? And I subscribed to some old favorites like On the Media, Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me and a bunch of podcasts from the BBC and KCRW.

But I'm most excited about the ones that are new to me. Start at Radiotopia which gathers seven really cool podcasts -- my favorite is 99% Invisible but they are all good. It's not all new stuff either; Fugitive Waves is work from the archives of the Kitchen Sisters and Radio Diaries has the work of producer Joe Richman. These are people whose stories are used as "texts" in radio grad school -- with the added benefit that they are a pleasure to listen to. You learn stuff and you're engaged/entertained.

You know what else I found out? John Oliver has a podcast! It's called The Bugle and it's done with Andy Zaltzman and it's very funny, especially if you're an aficionado of Anglo-American humor/satiric political commentary. Since I haven't talked anyone into handing over their HBO Go password to me yet, I was excited to learn I could get some free Oliver on a weekly basis. Another comedy podcast I haven't listened to yet is WTF with Marc Maron -- and classmates whose judgment I trust say it's great.

There are tons more and I won't list them all. But if you're curious, leave a comment and I'll try to find a recommendation in your area of interest.

And since this is supposed to be a book blog, I'll make a reading recommendation. I finally broke down during a trip into Falmouth this week and went into the really nice Eight Cousins bookstore. I bought a copy of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. It was a quick read and exactly what I needed. And it's set in these parts -- on fictional Alice Island, which doesn't exist in real life but which you reach via ferry from Hyannis.

The titular A.J. Fikry is a cranky widower who owns a bookstore on Alice Island. His life is changed entirely when a 2-year-old girl is left in the bookstore aisle. Blurbs and jacket copy recommend it for readers who liked The Art of Racing in the Rain and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society -- books I always felt I should have read when I was working at the library but avoided because I'm allergic to sentimental, uplifting stuff. But this book (A.J. Fikry) manages to be sweet while avoiding the saccharine. And it is suffused with a love of books and reading and writing. So I recommend it, though probably not to my more skeptical reading friends, or those looking for something with sharper edges.

* It's not just people under 30! Turns out this group also includes ... Ira Glass, the godfather of the public radio revolution (wait that's a bad metaphor -- the Fidel Castro of the Radio Revolution? The Leon Trotsky of the radio revolution?). Anyway here's what he said in response to a reader question in the Guardian:

When do you listen to the radio?

In the morning, when I shave. And really, not for very long. I don't hear the radio that much. I don't own a radio. I listen to everything through apps, or on my iPhone. And then I download the shows I like. Shows like Fresh Air,Radiolab, Snap Judgement, all those shows.

** TCHMA and I had a funny moment yesterday in class when we realized we were both thinking about the story of the guys behind the @Horse_ebooks Twitter feed (and more projects that may or may not constitute Internet performance art). I read the story in The New Yorker. He heard it on TLDR, the On The Media spinoff podcast. The title stands for Too Long Didn't Read -- in other words, it's the anti-New Yorker. We then raced to see which outlet had it first. Turns out Susan Orlean broke the story on the New Yorker's blog. I think.